jaw. He snapped it off its mounting and looked closer at it. “Your Commtact looks like it burned out. What happened to the Manta?”
“Charun and his girlfriend showed up,” Edwards explained. “With two of the missing mobile suits. The suits picked up the Manta.”
“Girlfriend?” Kane asked, fishing into a belt pouch for a replacement plate. Once he did, he handed it to Edwards, who donned the new communicator.
Almost instantly he heard Brigid Baptiste’s voice. “Give me a description of this girlfriend,” she ordered.
Edwards launched into his recorded memory, then tapped the interface on his suit’s forearm. “I’m also sending you the vid my suit captured.”
“That is Vanth, and her torch is of equal power to Charun’s hammer,” Brigid explained. “And, yes, they are partners. Psychopomps.”
“Psychos? Yeah, I can see that,” Edwards grumbled. “Psychopomp…that’s not the same as crazy, right?”
“The term ‘psychopomp’ is Greek. Literally translated, it is ‘guide of the soul,’’’ Brigid told them both. “Choosers of the slain. Angels or sub-deities who take people to the afterlife.”
“That explains the zombie-like appearance of the Olympian soldiers searching for me,” Edwards added.
“The theft of their spirit is a concerning development,” Brigid mused over the Commtact. “As do Charun’s recovery of his hammer and the disappearance of our second and currently only flight-capable Manta.”
Kane frowned. “You said this torch could spit out the bodies and then pick them up again. Don’t yell at me for being wrong, but that sounds an awful lot like the Threshold or Lakesh’s interphaser.”
“If that,” Edwards mused. “It could be like one of those traps in the old vids. The ones with the four guys fighting the ghosts?”
“Turning the humans and the mecha into energy, then storing it in that format?” Brigid inquired. “And, yes, Kane, I can see the similarities in your assessment, as well.”
Edwards frowned. “Great.”
“What’s wrong?” Kane asked.
“I’m getting used to this crazy shit,” Edwards grumbled.
Kane clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Come on. There’s room for you on Artem15’s other arm.”
Edwards nodded and the two men were picked up, gingerly, with a gentle touch belying the robot skeleton’s massive might. Once they were settled into the crooks of the giant’s elbows, it turned and began to run; long, looping strides that crossed first fifteen, then twenty, then finally thirty feet in a single bound.
The wind in Edwards’s face was cool and refreshing, a release from the paralyzed caution and stony patience he’d had to endure while waiting for the arrival of his allies.
He still couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d let everyone down. No matter how much information Brigid and Kane got from his report and his vid.
Smaragda sat at the conference table, her shoulders slumped, shocks of her white bangs hanging low over her baggy eyes. She stared at the top of the table, but she was so deadened, so numbed by the trauma of losing her platoon, she didn’t even register the grain of the faux wooden veneer topping the furniture in front of her. All she could do was fight the need to close her eyes, to dispel the horrors of her platoon’s swallowing, to keep the echoes of their screams from ringing in her ears.
She was clad in a nearly shapeless sweatshirt that covered her arms, hiding the recent work she’d carved into it with a razor. The flesh of her forearms was heavily checkered now and was raw from the disinfectant she’d poured over the dozens of new cuts to prevent sepsis. Smaragda hadn’t cut herself since she was a mere teenager, the focus and élan of being with the New Olympian military stealing not just privacy for the act, but also drowning out the need for controlling her pain.
Now her forearms stank of hydrogen peroxide, dampened somewhat by the loose bandages and the rumpled sleeves of her top. She didn’t know if her acknowledgment of the odors was just a strong memory or if she truly was literally reeking of it. Either way, it was too late now as the lights came on in the conference room, people filing in through different doors. Smaragda’s eyes rose slightly and she watched her queen roll herself along on her wheelchair.
Their eyes met as they were at the same level, and Smaragda instinctively looked back down, wishing that she could wither away, shrinking into the ground and out of the presence of Queen Diana.
She pressed her forearms harder against the tabletop and the pressure on her skin allowed slowly healing snips and cuts to pop open. It wasn’t the same kind of rush as she got from pressing a razor blade against it, but the pain still clouded her perceptions, taking her out of the moment, out of her self-loathing for…surviving.
Conversations murmured around the corners of her consciousness and it was something that helped her to muffle the distant memories of her dying friends. If only she’d stood her ground…at least she wouldn’t have felt so useless. No, she would have had the beautiful darkness of oblivion, her body and soul swallowed completely by the Stygian cloud, her suffering ended by its ravenous greed.
“So we have a new development,” Diana announced, her voice cutting sharply through both the conference room and into Smaragda’s numbed mind. “Our people are still alive.”
Smaragda looked up, staring at her queen, her hands clenching into tight fists so that even her closely trimmed nails threatened to spear through her palms. “What?”
“They are alive and under some form of mind control, or have had their bodies commandeered by the Etruscan menaces,” Diana clarified for her. “We have video of both the intruders and our missing people, thanks to Edwards over there.”
Smaragda glanced in the direction Diana pointed and saw a brawny, brooding figure, he having cast his eyes downward.
“Just trying to get as much as I could. I sure as hell was useless in terms of fighting those two,” Edwards grumbled.
Smaragda turned and glanced toward the screen, the lights dimming.
“Myrto, see if you can recognize anything off of the initial parts of the video,” Diana ordered. The queen’s voice held more than a little concern, something the disgraced soldier couldn’t understand. If anything, she should have been executed for such a disgusting failure.
Why worry about me? Smaragda mused silently. Why even have me here at this table?
But even as she did so, a small monitor was slid to her section of the table and she looked at the flying entities.
“Did you see anything like that?” Brigid Baptiste asked.
Smaragda shook her head. “The only thing any of us saw was a literal flood of dark, churning smoke. However, we were in the woods, and I couldn’t see through the canopy of trees.”
Brigid
